SPOILER ALERT: This piece contains spoilers for the entirety of We Were Liars — including the finale episode.
E. Lockhart’s best-selling YA book We Were Liars has come to life on the small screen thanks to Julie Plec, Carina Adly MacKenzie, the author herself and many, many more, including a stellar cast.
The television adaptation arrived with all eight episodes on Prime Video June 18, taking viewers through a twisty mystery set on the idyllic Beechwood Island, where the well-known Sinclair family summers every year. Secrets lurk beneath the elaborate facade the family, led by patriarch Harris Sinclair (David Morse), puts up.
RELATED: Everything We Know About The ‘We Were Liars’ Show So Far
As a follow-up to the first book, which was published May 13, 2014, Lockhart wrote a prequel about the three Sinclair sister characters whose sons and daughters are the stars of We Were Liars. The prequel book, Family of Liars, came out May 3, 2022. Some connections from that prequel book weave into the show. Other elements are completely brand new to the story told in the first season.
Find a list of We Were Liars TV show changes from the book below:
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The Timeline
Image Credit: Prime Video The show contains a shortened time jump, with Summer 15 being the summer that something happened to leave Cadence washed up on the shore of the beach with barely any clothing on and without any memories of what had happened to her.
RELATED: Everything We Know About The ‘We Were Liars’ Show So Far
In Lockhart’s book, Cady then goes to Europe for Summer 16 with her father, not returning to Beechwood Island until Summer 17 where she unravels her past. Thus, her injury and amnesia go unsolved for a longer period of time. In the show, there is no Europe trip in between summers, and summer 16 is the initial season where things change with summer 17 being when Cady puts the pieces together.
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The Party Boat
Image Credit: Prime Video Early on in the show, Harris takes issue with a somewhat noisy Party Boat that comes pretty close to the shores of Beechwood. Johnny Sinclair Dennis (Joseph Zada) immediately sees this as a challenge, committing himself to getting himself and his friends into the social scene.The core four Liars do eventually get on the boat because Johnny makes a connection, and they galavant on it at the end of the second episode, but there is tension between Emily Alyn Lind’s Cadence and Shubham Maheshwari’s Gat.
This is an addition to the show that is not present at all in the books, adding some depth to the young characters, especially given that We Were Liars is told in first-person from Cadence’s perspective, so readers’ understanding of the other Liars is more limited.
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Johnny’s Sexuality
Image Credit: Prime Video In the show, he has a heartfelt coming out moment with the other three Liars where he reveals he is still figuring things out in terms of his identity. He talks of getting involved with a fellow tennis doubles partner and there are multiple scenes where he is openly exploring his sexuality.In the book, there is no mention of Johnny’s sexuality.
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Rosemary Sinclair
Image Credit: Prime Video Rosemary was the fourth Sinclair sister and daughter of Harris and Tipper (Wendy Crewson). She is mentioned much more frequently in the prequel story, Family of Liars. She died at a very young age, but it seems her ghost haunts Carrie (Mamie Gummer), Penny (Caitlin FitzGerald) and Bess (Candice King).
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The 4th of July Party
Image Credit: Prime Video The 4th of July party on Beechwood in Episode 4 is also not in the book. Cadence also never gets as close to meeting Gat’s girlfriend Raquel in Lockhart’s novel, though that character does come from the source material. In the book, Cadence does see Gat sending Raquel a letter that she thinks, initially, is for her. But, Gat never breaks up with Raquel or even interacts much further with her during his fifteenth summer on the island.
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Mirren’s Romance with Ebon
Image Credit: Prime Video Mirren does tell of a relationship she has in the books, but that is with a high school senior named Drake Loggerhead, and he never shows up in the story. In the show, she strikes up a romance with “boat boy” Ebon (Dempsey Bryk), and they share some sweet moments together.
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The Lemon Hunt
Image Credit: Prime Video The extravagant lemon scavenger hunt in Episode 6 comes from Family of Liars. The tradition was one of Tipper’s favorites, and it involves over 100 lemons hidden around Beechwood Island (not in dangerous places), and one lime. There can be two winners — the one who finds the lime and the one who gathers the most lemons — with different prizes for each.
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Johnny’s Dark Secret
In the book, Johnny’s manic energy isn’t exactly grounded in anything concrete from his past, but in the show, he has a big secret that comes out when a few tennis players come to Beechwood and confront him about his brutal beating of a kid from a rival school.
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Harris’s Fall
Image Credit: Prime Video Harris does have a mental decline in We Were Liars, but it’s not quite attributed to anything like the accident he has in the show when he falls and hits his head pretty badly. The implication here is interesting with his memory issues lining up somewhat with Cadence’s traumatic head injury.
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Ed’s Proposal to Carrie
Image Credit: Prime Video In the book, Cadence hears about Ed’s failed proposal to Carrie secondhand, from Gat, long after it has happened. However, in the show, Rahul Kohli’s Ed has more hope for popping the big question and getting a yes. He even asks Harris (and Tipper) for their blessing before doing so.
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Gat’s Mother And Cady’s Father Visiting The Island
Image Credit: Prime Video Gat’s mother (Karen David) never visited Beechwood in the book, and neither did Cadence’s father (Charlie Carrick), though Cady’s dad did take her to Europe in the book in summer 16, which prompted the longer timeline and gap between what happened to the Liars and Cadence’s return to Beechwood.
The below include finale-specific spoilers, so if you haven’t watched that episode yet, you may want to wait!
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Carrie’s Vision of Johnny
Image Credit: Prime Video Carrie’s relapse into drug addiction isn’t as clear in Lockhart’s novel as it is in the show when Johnny calls her out for taking Percocet. The family also subtly realizes she might’ve been thinking about indulging in Harris’ expensive alcohol after an unopened bottle is found in their mother’s closet, where audiences previously saw Carrie toying with Tipper’s black pearls. Her vision of her dead son in the finale’s last moments also does not exist in the book, and it provides an intriguing cliffhanger for a potential Season 2 of the series. Plec has previously indicated that a second season would likely focus more on the events of the prequel book, which centers Carrie’s perspective.
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Cadence Going Back for the Black Pearls
Image Credit: Prime Video Both in the book and the show, Cadence sets her own fire without checking on her fellow Liars and their status. In the book, she realizes the horror of what she has done and tries to go back and claw her way into the house to save first the dogs and then her cousins and Gat, but it proves futile. In the show, the added wrinkle of saving the coveted black pearl necklace that Tipper always dangled in front of her daughters caused even more pain for Cady, because it prompted Gat to go into the house and perish in the fire.
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Gat Being in the Boat That Night
Image Credit: Prime Video Readers of the book will have an idea of how the show ends, and while the storyline mainly follows E. Lockhart’s book, the plan that the Liars make in the finale is slightly different in the show, mainly for Gat. Wanting to burn Clairmont House to the ground, the quartet decide to use newspaper as kindling and motor boat gas to cook up the conflagration. In the book, they each pick a level of the house to set fire to, and Gat’s assigned level is the basement. In the show, he is the driver of the getaway boat, but he does end up getting caught in the blaze.
